1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a carrier adapter for use between an integrated circuit chip with peripheral terminals and an underlying substrate with area-patterned bond sites, and more particularly to an adapter with mating pads on the top surface of the adapter that can be aligned with, connected directly with and bonded to peripheral terminals on a chip, reroute lines on the top surface of the adapter with first ends connected to the pads, and vertical through-vias connected to the second ends of the reroute lines that terminate at coupling elements in an array pattern on the bottom of the adapter.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current multi-chip circuitry design requires attachment of numerous electronic devices to an electrical interconnect substrate. Terminals on the electrical devices can be connected to pads on the surface of the substrates. The substrate can further include buried metal lines which interconnect selected pads, thereby providing electrical interconnection for the electronic devices.
Typically the conductive terminals on a high density integrated circuit chip are distributed over a very small area along the periphery of the top surface of the chip. Flip-chip bonding involves inverting the chip, aligning the terminals on the chip with pads on the substrate, contacting the terminals to the pads and then bonding the terminals to the pads.
There also exist adapters which can be sandwiched between an inverted integrated circuit and an underlying interconnect substrate. In particular, existing adapters can translate the conductive terminals on a chip to an array pattern of coupling elements, to be bonded to the substrate, which can be positioned inside the area of the chip and have substantially larger bonding faces than the terminals. The array pattern of coupling elements can also have generic configurations and dimensions suitable for a wide variety of substrates.
Kyocera has developed an adapter which uses the internal layers of a multilayer ceramic carrier to accomplish the translation, but must modify the ceramic fabrication process in order to customize the adapter for a terminal configuation. An adapter by Fujitsu connects the inner ends of bent leads to the terminals on the bottom of a chip, and the outer ends of the bent leads to the pads on an adapter, but requires two bonding steps for each terminal.
Accordingly, there exists a need for an improved adapter capable of providing periperal to area translation for the terminals on an integrated circuit chip.